Headwaters Economics, an outfit out of Montana, has a report out once again arguing that protecting lands — in wilderness, monuments, parks, what have you — does far more for the economy than we tend to give it credit for when we think locking it up keeps it from economically productive use. The bullet points:
From 1970 to 2010, the West’s employment grew by 152 percent compared to 78 percent for the rest of the country.
This western job growth was almost entirely in services industries such as health care, real estate, high-tech, and finance and insurance, which created 19.3 million net new jobs, many of them high-paying.
Western non-metropolitan counties with more than 30 percent of the county’s land base in federal protected status such as national parks, monuments, wilderness, and other similar designations increased jobs by 345 percent over the last 40 years. By comparison, similar counties with no protected federal public lands increased employment by 83 percent.
In 2010, per capita income in western non-metropolitan counties with 100,000 acres of protected public lands is on average $4,360 higher than per capita income in similar counties with no protected public lands.…
